Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Freshman Republican Senator Ted
Cruz probably doesn’t have enough votes to cut off funding for
the 2010 health-care law under a stopgap U.S. spending bill.

Yet the college debate champ may achieve other goals with
his campaign against the health initiative: Raising his national
profile and rallying support among the small-government, Tea
Party faction of a divided Republican party.

Cruz is showing no sign that he’ll retreat from his vow to
use a spending measure as leverage to halt implementation of
President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law. That’s even
as a talk-a-thon he began yesterday, during which he killed time
reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” and referencing the
reality TV show “Duck Dynasty,” alienated many fellow
Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until
I am no longer able to stand, to do everything that I can to
help Americans stand together and recognize this grand
experiment three and a half years ago is quite simply not
working,” Cruz said at the outset of 21 hours and 19 minutes of
remarks on the Senate floor that ended today in Washington.

Viewed by critics as an opportunist and by allies as an
ideological purist, Cruz, 42, has ruffled many feathers in
Washington since arriving in January. His delay tactics this
week could help push the federal government to the brink of a
shutdown Oct. 1.

Presidential Politics

Presidential politics are in play because Cruz is
positioning himself for a possible 2016 bid, and could push the
entire field into more strident positions at risk of alienating
independent voters. Like-minded Republican Senator Rand Paul of
Kentucky, another potential 2016 presidential candidate, plans
to vote with Cruz on the Senate spending bill.

Ivy League-educated and known for his fiery oratory, Cruz
is one of the nation’s most prominent Latino Republicans at a
time when his party is seeking to improve its standing among
Hispanics. Still, he acknowledges speaking “lousy” Spanish.

Cruz’s criminal law professor at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz,
has described him as one of the smartest students he’s ever had.
Cruz was selected for the Harvard Law Review, putting him in the
upper tier of one of the nation’s foremost law schools.

The Texas senator was awarded a prime-time speaking slot at
the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, and
the National Republican Senatorial Committee has tapped him as
vice chairman for grassroots outreach.

Rising Star

Although the two top Senate Republicans indicated that they
didn’t plan to back Cruz’s tactics, that doesn’t matter to Tea
Party activists, who see Cruz as a rising star of their
movement.

“He’s established something that I think people wanted to
see: Republicans who fight for what they believe in,” said Sal
Russo, chief strategist of the Sacramento, California-based Tea
Party Express, a political action committee.

“I don’t think anybody is saying you have to win,” Russo
said. “Everybody is saying that we should stand up, this is an
unpopular law, people are against it across the country and most
Republicans ran on the issue of repealing or at least defunding
it.”

While Cruz and his supporters touted his effort as a
“filibuster,” he couldn’t block the bill through extended
speechifying on the chamber’s floor. Instead, he tried to delay
its eventual passage by forcing two cycles of up to 30 hours of
debate before a final vote no later than Sept. 29.

Cutting Obamacare

Cruz mounted his challenge as the Senate is considering a
House bill passed Sept. 20 that cuts off money to implement
what’s often called Obamacare while financing the government
through Dec. 15. Senate Democrats have said they won’t pass a
bill that takes money away from the 2010 law.

Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina called
Cruz’s efforts a “failed” strategy.

“The potential downside is that the federal government
shuts down and it shuts down over health care versus over
spending,” he said. “The White House would welcome a shutdown,
and when it re-opens, health care will still be there.”

Others who declined to join Cruz’s effort are the Senate’s
top two Republicans, McConnell of Kentucky and Cruz’s fellow
Texan, John Cornyn. One former politician backing Cruz is 2008
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has fallen
from the national stage after flirting with a 2012 presidential
bid that never happened.

‘Wacko Bird’

Dismissed by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona as a
“wacko bird” when he sought to block John Brennan’s nomination
to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Cruz wears
the criticism as a badge of honor.

“The more appropriate avian metaphor would seem to be
peacock,” wrote Jason Zengerle in a profile of Cruz in the
October issue of GQ magazine.

Cruz was faulted by both sides of the aisle in February
when he tried to thwart fellow Republican Chuck Hagel’s
nomination as U.S. defense secretary. He argued that lawmakers
couldn’t be certain that Hagel didn’t give speeches underwritten
by “radical” groups, adding that he wanted proof Hagel didn’t
deposit funds into his bank account that came from Saudi Arabia,
North Korea or other foreign governments.

The effort prompted Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida
Democrat, to maintain that Cruz had gone “over the line” by
offering such suppositions and led Senator Barbara Boxer, a
California Democrat, to compare Cruz’s tactics with those used
by Joe McCarthy to identify suspected Communists in the 1950s.

‘Fixed Bayonets’

Cruz has angered the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal, a reliably anti-Obamacare voice. Under the headline
“The Cruz Campaign,” the paper’s top editorial yesterday said
the strategy being pushed by Cruz and Senator Mike Lee of Utah
is the equivalent of charging into “fixed bayonets.”

With his talk-a-thon, which began yesterday at 2:41 p.m.,
Cruz took a page from the playbook of Paul, who in March staged
a 13-hour filibuster on Brennan’s nomination that focused on the
Obama administration’s drone policy. Paul’s effort yielded
assurances that the unmanned aircraft wouldn’t be used for
strikes against American citizens on U.S. soil.

As Cruz talked into the night, he took occasional questions
from other senators, including Republicans Lee and Marco Rubio
of Florida and Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia. Shortly before
midnight, after speaking for almost nine hours, Cruz read a
batch of Twitter messages sent under the hashtag
“#MakeDCListen” in support of his remarks.

Campaign Promise

Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012, defeating a more
politically experienced Republican in the party primary with the
help of Tea Party activists. He argues that he is simply trying
to fulfill a campaign promise to attack Obamacare. Through his
staff, he declined an interview request yesterday.

As a student at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, Cruz
reveled in verbally sparring with his classmates over legal
questions, antagonizing many of them. Some referred to him as
“Bad Ted,” juxtaposing him with Theodore Ruger, a more soft-spoken student who often debated Cruz.

Ruger, now a law professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, said he doesn’t remember the comparison.

“He had a lot of the qualities on display that he does now
-- persistence, coupled with ample self-confidence,” said
Ruger, who both debated and played basketball with Cruz.

“People are sometimes so taken aback by his personality
that they failed to focus on the wrongheadedness of his ideas,”
he said. “In law school, I found him perfectly cable of
engaging in intelligent discussion with someone who disagrees
with him.”

Looking Ahead

Even in law school, Cruz was ambitious, trying to lay
groundwork for his future in politics. Kelby Hagar, a fellow
Texan, said Cruz approached him in the student commons during
the first week of school to solicit his help.

“He said, ‘You’re from Texas. You can help me in my
political campaigns,’” Hagar said. “The impression I got was
that he was not making a joke. He was deadly serious about it.”

Cruz is already spending time in Iowa, the state that hosts
the first presidential nomination voting.

On Oct. 25, he’s scheduled to headline an annual Ronald
Reagan dinner in Des Moines, one of the Republican Party of
Iowa’s largest events and a frequent stop for future national
candidates.

Iowa Appearances

That follows speaking appearances Cruz made in Iowa in July
and August to a group of Christian pastors, to a state party
fundraising luncheon and to a summit organized by the Family
Leader, an Iowa-based coalition that opposes abortion rights and
same-sex marriage.

“The most active in caucus season will be paying very
close attention not only to Senator Cruz, but also to those who
fail to support his effort,” Ryan Rhodes, a Tea Party activist
in Iowa, said in an e-mail.

Cruz has also made political visits to New Hampshire and
South Carolina, traditionally the second and third states for
nomination voting.

In August, he renounced his Canadian citizenship, removing
a potential distraction for a possible presidential bid.

Cruz was born in Calgary to an American mother,
automatically making him a U.S. citizen. The Dallas Morning News
reported Aug. 18 that he also became a citizen of Canada upon
his birth. The newspaper posted a copy of Cruz’s birth
certificate in a story on its website.

‘Natural Born’

The U.S. Constitution says that “no person except a
natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States,” may
be eligible for the presidency. It doesn’t specify what the term
“natural born citizen” means, and it doesn’t address dual
citizenship.

Cruz’s father was a Cuban citizen who fled the country in
1957 and studied at the University of Texas. He and his wife
were working in the oil business in Canada when their son was
born. The elder Cruz became a U.S. citizen in 2005.